orge H. Badger 




Class. 
Book_ 



. 



\ ** 



Copyright N°_ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 




eADo ' 



<rycp 



THE 

WATER-STAR 

BY 

George H. Badger 




boston 
American Unitarian Association 

1907 





•J&2' 




/ , 



I^r«Y of CONGRESS! 
iwu uooies Received 

SEP 12 19W 

COPY B. 






Copyright, ipo? 
By the American Unitarian Association 



The Heintzemann Press, Boston, Mass,, U.S. A, 






IX 







CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Water-Star // 

Landscape of the Soul 31 

The Haunts of the Hind 53 

Do we see Nature ? 73 



K 



THE WATER-STAR 




ft 



SENTmy young friend out 
one day in the summer- 
time, to find and bring 
home to me the most beau- 
tiful thing he could discover in Nature, 
and he brought me home a radian t flow- 
er. Its petals were white as with the 
light of ideal purity, and in its heart 
glowed the glory of the sun. He had 
found it floating on blue waters, as a 
star in the firmament, and the broad 
leaves it rested on reflected the verdure 
of a thousand hills. 

It was, of course, the water-lily, than 
which perhaps the common earth con- 
tains no lovelier blossom. At any rate, 
my friend thought so. " Here," said he, 
" is the most beautiful thing that Na- 
ture contains! " 
I took it and looked at it ; gazed into 



The Water-Star 



its well of noble whiteness, its eye of 
golden sunshine ; noted the perfect lin- 
ing of each dainty petal, and the soft 
restfulness of the vesture of green 
which was behind its color; — and 
then I turned it over, and said : 

"But see! this is only a broken frag- 
ment of something, not a whole thing. 
You have brought me only part, for 
here is the broken stem/' 

" Oh, but the rest was not beautiful/' 
said he; " it was but a long, monoton- 
ous reach of snaky stem, and then the 
foul clump of dank roots in the ooze 
of the stagnant pool. I only brought 
you the beauty part ; all that was of any 
consequence." 

"Of any consequence ?" said I. "Will 
the plant die because you have broken 
this lily off?" 

" No, of course not," he replied, " the 



[ig] A 



_* 



"The Water-Star 



plant will keep on growing and put 
forth more blossoms/ ' 

" Will the plant die if every blossom 
is picked off as it blooms ?" 

" No, it will keep on growing still, 
and next season will be found there in 
its place to put forth its buds and its 
leaves anew." 

" Suppose you had torn the root up out 
of its ooze and brought it to me in its 
ugliness. Could the lily and the leaf get 
along without its root?" 

" No indeed. All would wither as this 
flower will wither and die in a day or 
so." 

"Then the root can get along with- 
out the blossom, but the blossom can- 
not get along without the root. Then 
the blossom is only a thing of the hour, 
but the root a continuing source of 
beauty production. Then, after all the 



[13] ^ 



The Water-Star 



most important part of this plant which 
you have brought me a fragment of, is 
not the fragment which you have 
brought, but what you have left behind; 
not the radiance of white and gold 
which faces heaven with wide-open 
loveliness, but the dank, foul tangle of 
roots, which burrow in the mud, hid- 
den in the shadow of ugly obscurity." 
"Well, that may sound all right/' 
my friend replied, " but if these foul 
roots only brought forth foul blossoms, 
roots, blossom, and all would be of no 
consequence to us. It is because the 
blossom is beautiful, because Nature 
has this star of loveliness to float on the 
face of the placid waters, that the wa- 
ter-lily plant has any beauty for us at 
all. For us the roots have no meaning 
except that they make the flower pos- 
sible, — and so we leave them behind 

[ii] 



V 



The Water-Star 



because in the beauty we have that 
which we want." 

And saying this (I suppose because he 
was young), my friend seemed satis- 
fied, and went away. 

Here is my parable ; crude perhaps, 
though with its beautiful subject; and 
at any rate having a practical sugges- 
tiveness of its own. Nature makes a 
whole thing, — a plant ; root, stems, 
leaves and blossoms all together make 
a unity bound in the vital tie of shared 
life. And the center and source of the 
unity, the thing that makes a sisterhood 
of several radiant blossoms mimic the 
stars in a snug constellation of beauty 
points, opening, developing, holding 
together, is that ugly clump of dank 
roots down in the mire. They are the 
source of the unity. Everything with- 

[15] K 



The Water-Star 



ers if they fail ; other parts may fail and 
that motherhood of roots can replace 
them all. And yet we have no care for 
it, no interest in it. The lily on the sur- 
face is the whole plant for us. We care 
not that it is of itself a broken fragment 
of the larger whole. It is for us com- 
plete just in its own surface beauty. 

The world has always been partial to 
flowers and contemptuous of roots. It 
makes darlings of the loveliness which 
floats upon the face of the waters ; it ig- 
nores and despises the tangle of roots 
in the oozing mud. We like the flow- 
ers: flowers of the world's thought, 

— the exquisite poem or noble essay 
or wondrous tale which some genius has 
created ; flowers of the world's action, 

— conspicuous deeds of heroism, saint- 
ship, courage,loyalty,which stand forth 
radiant with the ideal beauty of trans- 



tie] ^ 



The Water-Star 



forming memory and tradition. But the 
roots from which these conspicuous 
splendors spring, down in life's mud of 
the commonplace, — the humdrum, 
patient, crude, awkwardly tangling 
thought and feeling and experience of 
common men and women, which are 
the beginnings and the sources of no- 
blest flights of literature and art : yes, 
the humdrum, patient, tangling im- 
pulses of conscience, feelings after duty, 
loves begetting sacrifices and neighbor- 
ships begetting kindnesses, in common, 
unconsequential walks of life, which 
are the beginnings and causes of great 
heroisms and martyrdoms ; that Shake- 
speare could not have written his mag- 
nificent tragedies, had not clowns first 
tried to be thoughtful ; that Christ on 
Calvary could not have glorified hu- 
manity's superb ideal of sacrifice in his 

[It] 



IV 



The Water-Star 



world-saving sacrifice, had not gener- 
ations of plodding Hebrew peasants 
wrestled and toiled and taken pains 
over daily problems of duty, love and 
reverence, back to the days when blood- 
stained savages yet strove to spell out 
" God " in plain letters of duty : these 
humble roots we think little of. They 
often are ugly and foul, and yet they 
bear the blossoms. 

We are all familiar with Mr. Gan- 
nett's wonderful sermon, " Blessed be 
Drudgery/' one of the most honestly 
inspired words of a prophet of God that 
our time has produced. Blessed be drudg- 
ery — the humdrum, treadmill duty of 
every day. Blessed be the things we do 
not want to do but have to do. Blessed 
be the annoyances and troublesome de- 
tails of life which fill up the common- 
places of day to day living. These are 

[18] 



The Water-Star 



the things that save a man's soul unto 
eternity. It seems hard sometimes to 
be always down where the roots are; 
always j ust doing commonplace things, 
pegging away at stale duties, as we say. 
And yet it is just because we are there 
most of our lives, — honestly there, 
trying to do a man's or a woman's duty 
there — that sometimes, in rare inter- 
vals, when great tests of life come, when 
great opportunities of glory come, we 
can rise on genuine waves of soul-ex- 
altation and feel that we are doing great 
things — noble things — things to be 
proud of! 

These things that men are proud of, 
let us be sure, are but the blossom points 
of life which have simply grown out 
of the humdrum roots of days and days 
of sturdy, simple living, straight and 
true and inconspicuous ; — one never 
_ 



The Water-Star 



thinks to be proud of them, but they 
are life's divine sources of abiding pride. 
It is what a man does when he sells 
goods over the counter of his store day 
by day, if he is an honest store-keeper ; 
or what a teacher does when she goes 
over that troublesome lesson in arith- 
metic, the ninth, the tenth, the twen- 
tieth time, with that stupid pupil of 
hers, to make it stick as a factor in his 
education, as surely as though he were 
brightest pupil in her class ; it is what 
the housewife does when day by day 
she persists in her ideal of neatness and 
order in her household, that she and 
those dear to her may have refined and 
self-respecting comfort in it ; it is what 
the farmer does when he strives to make 
his nineteenth or his thirtieth furrow 
in the field as straight and well-seeded 
as his first; or the blacksmith does, 

[20] 



Y 



The Water-Star 



when he counts on trusting not nearly 
every nail, but every nail that he puts 
into the horse's shoe, to do a good nail's 
duty till the shoe comes off: — these 
are the things which make the world 
grow in beauty, make it possible that 
star-points of exceptional heroism and 
inspiration stud the upper surface of 
life's sky-reflecting waters. 

There is superb significance in the 
fact that before Jesus of Nazareth at- 
tained unto his open Messiahship of 
preaching and healing, crowding into 
two short years, beginning with the 
modesty of John's baptism and ending 
with the anguish-glory of Calvary, so 
much of divine living that could be 
shared with the centuries, he had known 
how to be a good carpenter in Naza- 
reth, to make each day's work honest, 
square and true, as the shavings rolled 
_ 



The Water-Star 



before his urging plane and nails leaped 
to their places before his stalwart ham- 
mer. 

I doubt not what made it possible for 
Abraham Lincoln to prove just that 
rock-like embodiment of a nation's 
brave, unflinching, consecrated loyalty 
at a time when tower of manly recti- 
tude and eager conscience was the one 
resolute fact which the nation needed, 
was that in days when Abe Lincoln 
was simply apoverty-mired boy, tangled 
in temptations to shiftlessness, lowness, 
and coarse ambitions, which belonged 
to his heredity, he worked his life out 
true, — not in brilliant fashion, but in 
honest, patient fashion to an ideal of 
rectitude and honor that was the sav- 
ing of his country. 

I do not think we will find a man who 
has been conspicuous anywhere for he- 

[22] 



The Water-Star 



roic service, for exalted loyalty, or de- 
votion to humanity, in exceptional 
crises of his life, but if we knew the 
whole story of that life we should find 
every conspicuous service of heroism 
closely knit to a lifetime of inconspic- 
uous trying, over and over again, to 
be true in places where things are com- 
mon. Out of their commonplace came 
the strength of the more conspicuous 
duty. 

And then there is another thing. We 
speak of the ugliness of the mud and 
mire and the tangled roots that lay 
therein; but beauty is largely a mat- 
ter of observation. We pick out the ex- 
pansive lily, the high-hued rose, the 
glorifiedlandscape of September moun- 
tains, or the infinite beauty of the wide- 
reaching sea, as amongst Nature's most 
beautiful aspects; and so they are; but 



fr [23] 



The Water-Star 



the microscope poises over a bit of 
mould upon a discarded crust of bread, 
and bids us look and see beauties we 
had not dreamed could be there ; aye, 
it takes us down even into that slime 
and mire where the lily roots are, and 
says, "But pay attention, look hard 
enough, think hard enough, and you 
will find beauties here to amaze your 
eyes"; and as the tiny processes of root- 
fibre are patiently traced out, and their 
secret of coaxing nutriment from sur- 
rounding matter understood, when the 
eye through the microscope stops to no- 
tice specks, what they are,and how they 
hold together ; — why, there in the 
mud and mire there is beauty. The 
loveliness is not all up there where the 
lily spreads its conspicuous petals. 
Down where hairlike rootlets twine 
and toil there is beauty too, which is 

[24] 



The Water-Star 



only lost because we have not the pa- 
tience and the skill to hunt it out in 
its fine minuteness. 

So I imagine it is with these com- 
monplace, humdrum duties and loyal- 
ties of life which make the root-fibres 
of what we call life's more conspicu- 
ous glories of heroism, genius and in- 
spiration. It is grand that Savonarola 
died sublimely true to great principles 
in days of medieval Florence. It is glo- 
rious that heroes met their fate so lust- 
ily at Thermopylae, and Gettysburg, 
and San Juan, and Fort Arthur for that 
matter. It is superb that Father Da- 
mien died the martyr's death at Ha- 
waii, to the knowledge of the globe, 
and a Dakota school-mistress made a 
western blizzard holy by her sublime 
daring. But I fancy that there are work- 
ingmen who are making sacrifices just 

[25] 



The Water-Star 



as genuine and beautiful every day they 
live, trying to stand by conscience in 
their daily duty; there are school-teach- 
ers who, week in and week out, do deeds 
of insignificant loyalty to poor, dull 
children in their charge, sharing the 
beauty of that Dakota heroine's service, 
if we could only trace their sacrifice 
out. Mothers in their homes live epics, 
husbands attheir trade weavelove-lyrics 
touched with pathos of strong tragedy, 
all beautiful, all holy, right in the com- 
monplace mud and mire of humdrum 
drudgery of life; only we have not the 
delicacy of sight and discerning soul 
to measure these things. These things 
count in the making possible of greater 
heroisms, loyalties, and high steps of 
progress when great crises demand 
them. They are the roots, the won- 
drously minutely fibrous roots of the 

[ie] 



3S 



The JVater-Star 



blossoming of humanity's best glories ; 
but then of themselves they are beau- 
tiful and true and holy, divine and rich 
toward God ! 

Here is life's comfort. We are all parts 
of the glory. We all live and work day 
by day among the roots of the world's 
coming divinity — the roots of its high- 
est and noblest things that are to be ; 
and we cannot take hold of a duty so 
common but it concerns the best. We 
help to make to-morrow's best. We 
are the beginnings perchance of the 
Savonarolas and Damiens and Lincolns 
that are to be. We are at the roots, — 
but we are in the beauty spots too, if 
we could only learn it ; and if we saw 
as God sees, if we could only take long 
views of things and fine views of things, 
we should learn, no doubt, that the 
world's beauty and divinity come most 
_ 



The Water-Star 



from the massing of life's little loyal- 
ties, as in the rainbow arch it is drops 
of water, not mountain-mimicking 
clouds, that make the vision possible, 
because each drop of water answers 
true when its own sunbeam kisses it, 
blue, green, or red. 

So in the glory of the world's prog- 
ress, what to-day is for you and me in 
its drudgery, in its patience, in its duty 
done and love made loyal, each shares 
in the whole of it; no part is lost, no 
part lacking honor, no great, no small 
in God's fine measure ; for all fills out 
eternity. 

" Let me go where'er I will, 
I hear a sky-born music still : 
It sounds from all things old, 
It sounds from all things young, 
From all that's fair, from all that's foul, 
Peals out a cheerful song ; 



The Water-Star 



It is not only in the rose, 
It is not only in the bird, 
Not only where the rainbow glows, 
Nor in the song of woman heard: 
But in the darkest, meanest things, 
There alway, alway, something sings ; 
'Tis not in the high stars alone, 
Nor in the cups of budding flow'rs, 
Nor in the red-breasts' mellow tone, 
Nor in the bow that shines in showers — 
But in the mud and scum of things, 
There alway, alway something sings." 



[29] 



IX 




LANDSCAPE OF THE SOUL 

REFERRED alittle while 
ago to Mr. Gannett' s noble 
epistle of common-sense, 
— "Blessed be Drudgery." 
There is a passage in it which has in- 
exhaustible suggestion, and which fills 
out the measure of our Water Star's 
parable to surpassing overflow. The pas- 
sage is this : " My Real is not my Ideal 
— is that my complaint ? One thing at 
least is in my power: if I cannot realize 
my ideal, I can at least idealize my real" 
Now what does that mean ? Of course 
it may mean several things, and Mr. 
Gannett plainly sets forth in his sermon 
what he has first in mind. To find his 
meaning you must read his sermon; 
for the thought I have in mind is some- 
what different from his, in form at any 

[33] ^ 



Landscape of the Soul 



rate : and to make it plain I set forth 
this parable. 

You have gone for beauty-pilgrimage 
to the seashore. I do not mean fash- 
ion's mutilation of the seashore, where 
huge hotels and pavilions and plank- 
walks and sprawling piers vulgarize and 
cheapen the divinity of nature ; but to 
the real sea-shore where there are no 
crowds, where sea-line is almost wholly 
unimpeded, and nature's simplicity al- 
most supreme. And yet not quite. 
Though the crowds have not discov- 
ered it, some sturdy, frugal fisherman 
has. And here on this beach he has 
built his fisherman's hut : rude, clumsy, 
misshapen; and a wreckeddory is pulled 
up before it; and the patched sail is hung 
out somewhere to dry ; and untidy nets 
and lobster-pots are strewn about. And 
you come upon this hut in your wan- 

[ii] 



Landscape of the Soul 



dering along the beach, which before 
had been unimpeded, and you say, 
" What an eye-sore ! What an ugly blot 
upon the landscape ! " and in disgust you 
pass it by. 

But the artist has been along here too, 
and you go some later day to his stu- 
dio in the city to see his paintings of 
this familiar shore. He has caught the 
beauty of every picturesque headland, 
and tranquil inlet bay, and mazy creek, 
and river-fen of weird expanse. He has 
in a score of water-colors or bold oil- 
paintings given back to you better than 
your memories of the things you have 
seen,because he has baptized them with 
the artist's consecration. And amongst 
all these pictures of the artist there is 
one which pleases you best of all, and 
pleases everybody best of all, — the gen- 
eral favorite in the collection : it is a 



H [35] 



Landscape of the Soul 



picture whose dominating feature is 
that rough fisherman's hut ! The ocean's 
sweep is there with its divine mysteri- 
ous marriage of sea and heaven in the 
dim horizon line, and its genial glimpse 
of landward hills and meadows; but the 
fisherman's hut — shall I say it? — is 
the divine thing in the picture, its cen- 
tral glory. And the fisherman's hut just 
as it is, — not fixed over with lines made 
graceful and rents concealed to meet 
dainty taste; ah, that is not the true 
artist's way, ever, you know. Every 
seam there, every rent and weather- 
stain there, and the clumsy wreck of 
a dory with its side broken in, and the 
untidy lobster-pots, and the patched 
sail, and all of it, there just as it was 
when you saw it. The artist has not 
idealized it by making it something 
other than it was; and yet has ideal- 

[36] 



Landscape of the Soul 



ized it. You saw it as something ugly, 
and he as it were came and laid his hand 
on your shoulder and said, " See, it is 
something beautiful"; and you looked 
— through the magic glass of his paint- 
ing — you looked, and sure enough 
it was "something beautiful": part 
of a divine landscape, without a line 
changed or detail altered. 

Now how did it happen? Who can 
tell? It was the artist's secret, which 
is a part of God's secret, that he could 
find a way of looking at that hut and 
helping you look at it, which should 
make landscape of it, a part of the glory 
of the wondrous ocean and the kindly 
meadowlands; weave itinto their beau- 
ty till it became one with them, and 
they one with it, in a rich artistic ideal; 
— in a high artistic realization ; and 
then it became the most significant fac- 

[37] 



Landscape of the Soul 



tor of them all. He could do it because 
he was an artist. A mere photographer 
could not do it ; it is not a thing of light 
and shadow reflection which a camera 
catches, but of thought and feeling re- 
flectionwhich the imagination catches; 
and thus catching, makes patch and 
rent, and clumsy wreck, and untidy lit- 
ter, part of a scheme of soul-satisfying 
beauty: because it is looked at from 
its beauty side. 

Now it is just so with the things in 
human experience which seem hum- 
drum, imperfect, seamy, rude, and un- 
pleasing. We stumble upon them sud- 
denly, and we say "They are bad!" 
We do not like them. We protest against 
them. We have an ideal of what ought 
to be which is infinitely different from 
them. And yet I believe, as I believe 
there is God, and because I believe it, 

[38] 



Landscape of the Soul 



— as I believe in immortality, and be- 
cause I believe that — I believe there 
is not one of these harsh, hard, seam- 
scored factors of human experience 
which so try our souls in actual being, 
but, if we can only make spiritual land- 
scape of it, see it in relation, that is, to 
larger things to which it belongs: have 
the ocean of God's patience for a part 
of its background,have the genial sweep 
of human progress for a part of its set- 
ting, — if we could see it in its divine 
relation and its true aspect, why that 
hard, clumsy thing would become, with 
no change of its seams and its rents, — 
just as it is it would become beautiful 
and meaningful and holy : a thing to 
thank God for, when before it had 
been ugly and bad. It would become, 
that is, ideal, possessed with an idea, 
when before it had been idealless in its 



[39] 



Landscape of the Soul 



harsh, crude, uncomprehended limita- 
tion. 

Shall I try to put this in more prac- 
tical terms ? We said it was the artist's 
gift, a part of that mystery which we 
call Genius (because we know not what 
it is), that made him able to transmute 
an ugly fisherman's hut to a thing of 
artistic beauty. But now we are dealing 
not with a matter of genius, but of life's 
simple secret of spiritual faith, which 
is the gift of every soul born into the 
world, if we shall use it. We idealize 
the real when we fill it full of a high 
and interpreting idea, and thus find its 
relation to life's supreme and large and 
abiding ideals. 

Now what are life's supreme and large 
and abiding ideals ? Shall I mention two 
or three of the most fundamental and 
obvious of them ? First amongst them 

[40] 



Landscape of the Soul 



perhaps is the thing we call Love : — 
not a tangible fact, not a thing to be 
seen or handled, or measured in mate- 
rial dimensions; just a matter of ideas, 
and yet so real a thing in one sense, and 
so mighty in its realness ! All that hu- 
man experience has yet attained in all 
the richness and deepness of heart joy- 
ance ; in its intensest form the passion 
of hunger in the soul to live one's life 
out into the life of other than oneself 
so supremely that sacrifice is joy and 
self-forgetting the better part of nature ; 
and in common and more average ex- 
perience is yet a warmth and a glow 
and a vitality of sympathy that makes 
the soul to be feeling itself out ever 
into the realm of other souls for the 
normal satisfaction of its own being, 
— this, I say, is all very real, positive, 
actual, in every soul's experience; but 

[ii] 



Landscape of the Soul 



this is only the beginning of the final 
substance of love. For the great fact 
of love is that which has not been at- 
tained yet, — a power of love greater 
than the best that you and I have yet 
felt in noblest love for parent, or wife, 
or husband, or dearest friend, or the 
rare child that consecrates the house- 
hold. Our dream and yearning, our 
growing aptitude for a quality of love 
nobler even than the best we have yet 
made actual ; which we believe in su- 
premely, but have not quite consum- 
mated, — an ideal that opens out of the 
actual but as yet transcends it, and that 
we dimly dream of when we think of 
the love of the Eternal God, all-em- 
bracing, all-understanding, all-suffer- 
ing, all-rejoicing. This then for the 
soul's first ideal. 
And next that imperative fact which 

[ii] 



Landscape of the Soul 



conscience insists on, — Righteousness, 

— the thing that ought to be, not as 
a dream of happiness, but a reality of 
Duty : hero's loyalty to the death be- 
cause of conscience, in extreme form 

— but then, every day, the loyalty of 
steadfast honesty, justice, purity, and 
honor in one's relation to fellow-men ; 
and this an ever-growing passion and 
ideal of Rectitude that recedes forever 
in strong alluring challenge ; and then 
Truth, which means utter Sincerity for 
us, day by day ; and ever reverence for 
the deep verities of God as slowly we 
grow into their knowledge; — and at 
our best attainment feel that we know 
but in part and prophesy but in part : 
these three, — Love, Righteousness, 
and Truth, — Sympathy, Honesty and 
Sincerity, — these are at once the su- 
preme ideals, and the inevitable reali- 

[43] 



Landscape of the Soul 



ties of the inner life, which becoming 
solvents (shall we say) of the concrete 
details of humdrum, hard, and sin- 
smirched daily living, may give them 
in their realness high worth of the ideal 
and make them divine. 

What I mean is this: let any hum- 
drum, trying experience of life's grim 
reality come upon you, as it is sure to 
come to-day, to-morrow, some day, in 
its petty form or its tragic form. You 
may view it in two ways; you may view 
it solely from the point of view of utter 
selfishness, narrow and petty standards 
of personal comfort and advantage ; and 
then all its ugliness appears. You are 
like the inartistic man stumbling at ran- 
dom on that fisherman's hut and find- 
ing it only an eyesore. Or you may 
look at it from the point of view of your 
soul's larger ideal of righteousness, 

[44] 



Landscape of the Soul 



sympathy and truth-fidelity ; of what 
you of your own soul's simple con- 
science, love and sincerity can put in- 
to it to make it for its best in the up- 
building of your greatening soul, and 
what you can think of God through 
it, in his eternal patience of love-prog- 
ress that involves your ceaseless Im- 
mortality, — in other words, view it for 
what you can be, to-day, to-morrow, 
and forever in soul-discipline through 
it rather than what you must take of 
passing discomfiture from it as a mere 
pleasure-seeking mortal, and then you 
are like the soul-artist: you see in pro- 
portions of divinity ; you share in the 
secret of the living of God. 

For instance: there is the old shoe- 
maker, pegging and stitching away at 
his bench, day in and day out, as he 
has for thirty years perhaps. Veryhum- 



[4£] ^ 



Landscape of the Soul 



drum, mean and paltry his daily task, 
it may seem, that his humble discon- 
tent be sombre as the clinging dullness 
of a bleak November rainstorm. Where 
is the ideal to come in there ? Why, it 
comes in certainly for that shoemaker 
amongst shoemakers who fills every 
moment's pegging, every inch of shoe- 
leather cut, every stitch taken, with his 
ideal of honesty and good workman- 
ship,that makes it become an evergrow- 
ing pride to him that every shoe leav- 
ing his bench be from top to toe an 
honest shoe, and a little better shoe than 
he ever made before; that its wearer 
at the end of the first month, or at the 
end of the second month, or at the end 
of the seventh month, be satisfied that 
the stitch has hung on as it ought to 
hang, that the leather has worn evenly 
as it was expected to wear and that each 

[46] 



Landscape of the Soul 



nail and each stitch in the sole or top 
has been honest to its place, where the 
shoemaker put it. Humble ambition 
but holy ! With such an ideal glowing 
into pride, and ambition of fidelity 
flooding and glorifying every hour's 
work, every passing moment of hum- 
drum toil, why, I tell you, that shoe- 
maker lives in heaven the day through. 
The real is with him, but he has found 
a glory of ideal for it, and it opens its 
windows straight to God. 

Many a mother could teach us our 
lesson here : has she one or a dozen chil- 
dren clamoring about her for constant 
care. We all idealize the mother's func- 
tion ; in the large it is so sweet and beau- 
tiful, — oh, how sweet and beautiful as 
we come to look back to it through a 
vista of long years ! And yet the mother 
can tell us that even with best of chil- 

[47] 



Landscape of the Soul 



dren (and we were not all of us the 
best), the details of motherly duty are 
often so humdrum, so wearisome, so 
unattractive, so filled with things that 
try the patience and discourage the 
heart, that seem wholly unnecessary 
and wasted effort. And yet the true 
mother is she who weaves each detail 
of such duty into the large and glow- 
ing ideal of her mother-love and her 
mother-hope; all her ambitions and 
dreams and longings and yearnings for 
her child, which look forward to days 
far future, when as a man among men, 
a woman among women, her child shall 
make her proud and glad, shall help 
the world and enrich humanity, because 
of what she, the mother, can do to- 
day, to-morrow, to mould its little 
life, develop character, ensure health 
of body and of soul, and make growth 
_ 



Landscape of the Soul 



a glory, not a shame, — all this, the 
mother's ideal, wedding love with 
hope's fidelity, becomes background, 
love's boundless ocean, hope's encirc- 
ling mountains and meadowlands, for 
the glorifying of each most insignifi- 
cant duty and task and trial of patience, 
and agony of worry, in the seamy 
real of present responsibility. The dif- 
ference between a good mother and a 
bad mother is not so much usually that 
one is wiser than the other, or that 
one loves better than the other: the 
one has power of persistent ideal in 
each day's actuality of motherly duty ; 
nothing so trifling or hard or hum- 
drum or patience-taxing in what she 
has to do for her child but has its land- 
scape setting, it is idealized, filled with 
the divine ideas, the holy expectan- 
cies of motherhood, — love, fidelity, 

[49] 



Landscape of the Soul 



hope, and loyalty, which have ever 
their future-look. 

This world is a pretty mean world to 
live in, — for mean souls. No doubt of 
that. But for souls that have large vis- 
ions, for souls that know the deep real- 
ity of love, duty and sincerity, it is a 
world crowded to the shreds of com- 
mon happening with meanings of di- 
vinity. It is a small and unsatisfactory 
world for him who is shut in, day by 
day, by the dreary, monotonous walls 
of life's little but uncompromising ac- 
tualities. The real to such a man is not 
pleasant. But to the man who can see 
in divine proportions, through the soul's 
clear lenses of Conscience, Love, and 
Verity, — to him who knows the real- 
ities of life's ideals, every day has ideal 
beauty for its landscape-setting of di- 
vine reality. 

[50] 



Landscape of the Soul 



And to such a soul God is real, for 
He is the eternal mystery of divine 
ideal which holds each particle of daily 
happening in his abiding Beauty. He 
is the Eternal Love, the Eternal Right- 
eousness, the Eternal Truth, we can 
never get away from. He is the soul's 
comfort and the soul's restfulness: for 
He is the soul's Reality of Ideal. 



ft [51] 




THE HAUNTS OF THE HIND 

SET forth yet another par- 
able to fulfil our thought. 
This too shall be a parable 
of the out-door world ; but 
as a hero-poet of long ago taught it. 
A fiery but sensitive-souled prophet 
of righteousness lived amongst a people 
all too given to evil and wrong; and 
sweeping down upon them were com- 
ing ruthless invaders of the north, with 
horror in their track. He knew what 
hostile invasion meant in those days: 
the destruction of crops, the wasting 
of fields, the slaughtering of people, 
and the anarchy of social despair. He 
realized it all with a sensitive imagi- 
nation's keenest poignancy; and he 
knew that he, the poet, as well as the 
coarsest, grossest sinner in the land, 

[5j 



The Haunts of the Hind 



must suffer cruelly in the evil day. And 
yet he sings, for his own soul — and I 
think too in his better hope of what his 
people had in them for faith in adver- 
sity; — he sings in what I sometimes 
think to be the most beautiful pas- 
sage of lyric poetry that Hebrew lit- 
erature contains: 

" For though the fig-tree shall not blossom, 

Neither shall fruit be in the vines, 

The labor of the olive shall fail, 

And the fields shall yield no meat, 

The flocks shall be cut off from the fold, 

And there shall be no herd in the stalls, — 

Yet will I rejoice in the Eternal. 

I will joy in the God of my salvation . . . 

Jehovah, the Eternal, is my strength, 

And he maketh my feet like hinds' feet ; 

And will make me walk upon mine high places. 

What is the significance of that allu- 
sion to the "hind's feet"? 
Why, the hind is one of those mem- 

[56] 



X 






"The Haunts of the Hind 



bers of the deer family whose home is 
amongst the crags and precipices of the 
mountain districts, Down along the 
plains the sheep and cattle graze in easy 
luxury over their boundless pastures; 
life is easy for them, and food always 
to be had for the nibbling of it. But 
it is not so with the hind in her moun- 
tain-haunts. She clambers over dizzy 
heights, and along beetling cliffs, and 
takes her scant-growing food where she 
finds it. But life for her is not there- 
fore all hardship. She clambers over 
rough places, and threads her narrow 
passes, and leaps along her crags and 
precipices as easily and joyously as the 
plodding bullock passes along his fat- 
tening pastures: — why? Why, because 
the God of Nature has adapted her just 
to her kind of life ; has made her feet 
nimble and sure and firm, — strong for 

[57] 



The Haunts of the Hind 



the beating against rocky ways, and 
supple for the leaping along dizzy 
heights. God has made her good for 
just that sort of thing ; and so she does 
not mind it ; she finds life's joy and sat- 
isfaction and peace amongst just such 
conditions, — because she is a hind. 

" Now/' says the poet, in effect : " life 
as I find it in my serious manhood is 
not always broad and fertile meadow- 
land of fat prosperity; sometimes there 
are the rough, rocky places in it; some- 
times my way lies along dizzy heights 
of baffling adversity, sometimes amid 
the narrow and steep passes of harsh vi- 
cissitude; sometimes that is the story 
of human life, as I have to live it. But 
I am not going to give up finding joy 
in life, because of that ; my chance to 
live in substantial satisfaction of soul is 
not to be spoiled because of that. Let 

[ii] 



The Haunts of the Hind 



the worst come, in outward vicissitude 
— although fig-trees shall not blossom 
for me any longer, neither shall there 
be fruit for me upon the vine, and all 
the forms of outward prosperity be tak- 
en from me, and the dizzy barrenness 
of bleak misfortune be the way that I 
must go, — yet will I rejoice still in the 
splendid might of my confidence in 
Eternal God ; I will j oy in the sure sup- 
port of his inner saving : for He had 
in mind just such places as these when 
He brought me into being; His cre- 
ative energy goes along with me in my 
going. And when the way is along diz- 
zy heights and rough,harsh rocks, why, 
He makes me good for it. He has fash- 
ioned my humanity just to meet such 
crises : He has made my feet like hinds' 
feet, and will make me to walk — not 
falter helplessly and fail and stumble 

[59] 



The Haunts of the Hind 



and sink in weak despair — but make 
me to walk, with firm and agile and 
sure-stepping feet, along mine high 
places. That is the prophet's thought; 
and we may find it splendidly, whole- 
somely inspiring. 

For this is a very good parable for 
those who are in the midst of great 
afflictions and trials; but then it is a 
peculiarly good parable for those of us 
who are just in ordinary, average ways 
of life. For average, ordinary ways of 
life are checkered ways. There come 
neither the overwhelming tragedies of 
woe, nor the dazzling riches of excep- 
tional prosperity ; but there are forever 
the little alternations of life that goes 
quite easily and life that comes a little 
hard. And sometimes the fat pasture- 
lands of prosperity are a little more 
extensive than at other times, and some- 

[60] 



"The Haunts of the Hind 



times the bleak high-places of moun- 
tain-adversity are a little more steep and 
dizzy than at other times. But if we 
want to carry the burden of our life 
right through it all, with the swing, 
and the eagerness, and the substantial 
weight of soul-comfort that can make 
the soul solidly worth the best of its 
own manhood powers, we must catch 
the spirit of this prophecy and sing to 
the music of this psalm, feel the abid- 
ing joy of confidence in the sure fact 
of the Eternal, that it is altogether 
good, though in ways that we cannot 
always understand; and that at any rate 
He understands us and has made us 
good for the ways we are called upon 
to go. And if the dizzy heights are 
before us, and narrow crags, then He 
makes the feet of our spirit's going just 
right for that sort of going, — makes 

[61] 



The Haunts of the Hind 



our feet like hinds' feet, that we may 
walk sure-footed along our high places. 

It is so in matters of religious faith. 
Sometimes it is our good fortune just 
to be in faith's broad pasture-lands. 
Religion's faith is life's easy, comfort- 
able experience. The sun floods the 
world for us, every morning, with the 
warm passion of its soul-assuring glow ; 
and the afternoon showers water our 
souls to sweet confidence in things the 
world has ever trusted ; and the silent 
stars at night are threaded on tender 
reverences; and the joys of home-life, 
and friendships, and the poetry of lov- 
ers, and the calm cadences of daily duty, 
all strengthen and sweeten and fructify 
the soul's abiding confidence in the 
things that Religion stands for, and has 
stood for with our fathers. 

But that does not last always for all 

[62] 



The Haunts of the Hind 



souls. There come the bleak places of 
religious doubt ; there come the rough, 
jagged rocks of spiritual questionings 
and skepticisms ; there come the dizzy 
heights of perplexity and daring specu- 
lation ; and then, perhaps, it seems to 
the soul as though it must give up; it 
cannot go any further ; it must stumble 
and fall along such courses. But if the 
soul will only have the prophet's cour- 
age and the poet's vision, — ah, but if 
the soul will only have the honest rec- 
ognition of its own inherent powers, 
— there is always the undertow of faith, 
may I say? or, better, the oversweep 
of spiritual confidence, brooding over 
the soul, even in its seeming chaos of 
doubt and perplexity — (the Holy Spir- 
it of the Eternal moving over the face 
of troubled waters) ; and it makes the 
soul good for its hard places ; maketh 

[63] 



The Haunts of the Hind 



its feet like hinds' feet, that it may 
walk along dizzy courses of its high 
places, and find at last the joy of so 
walking. 

For the souls in the world to-day that 
are finding religion most virile, most 
positive, fullest of the fine exhilaration 
of splendid purpose and holy power, 
are the souls not who have found re- 
ligion a way of placid ease, but have 
clambered over Faith's dizzy places and 
leaped its jagged crags, and learned 
God's gift of spirit's virile adaptation, 
— that the feet of their souls were made 
like hinds' feet to walk in confidence 
along Faith's sheer high places. 

It is so, too, with the experiences of 
our inner heart-life. How every friend- 
ship, no matter how noble, is check- 
ered with its pasture-lands of abound- 
ing joy inconfidence and understanding 

[64] 



The Haunts of the Hind 



and genial sympathy, and its dizzy 
heights of trial and misunderstanding 
and harsh test of affection! How every 
love-story is a story of vicissitude ! How 
that great commonplace of human life, 
— which is at once its great consecra- 
tion and its great mystery, — the mar- 
ried life, tangling love of children and 
their bafflements with the wedded love 
of man and wife, — how all of these 
bring their inevitable alternations of 
easy places and hard places for love ! 
smooth, rich meadow-lands, and beet- 
ling heights of trial and perplexity ! 
And everything is splendid so long as 
it is all meadow-land ; then we sing for 
the poetry of it, and even have smooth 
gladness for the prose of it. But then 
the little crises of misunderstanding — 
then the little tragedies of stinging 
doubt and suspicion and perplexity, — 

[65] 



The Haunts of the Hind 



then the narrow, steep passes of per- 
sonal patience put to straining test, and 
sympathy sorely over-tried, and the 
hard, grim crags of uncomfortable sense 
of justice and duty-exaction made ag- 
gressively stern, instead of easily joy- 
ous : these surely come ; the way goes 
hard ; the path gets dizzy ; there is a 
chance to weaken in discouragement, 
to give it all up, and stumble and fall. 
But oh, the prophet's message and the 
poet's song ! If the way is hard and steep 
and baffling for love to walk, where it 
used to be smooth and easy, doubt not 
the Spirit of Eternity knows it ; He had 
it in mind when He created the mys- 
tery of human love and friendship; He 
had it in mind when He formed the 
human soul, and to-day is continuing 
in the divine processes of its higher 
creation through social evolution. And 

[66] 



IX 



The Haunts of the Hind 



He made the soul just right for meet- 
ing just such experiences: He maketh 
its feet like hinds' feet; He maketh 
you that you may walk along your own 
soul's peculiar high places. And don't 
we know, every soul of us, that we have 
never begun to dream even of the fin- 
est joy of splendid friendship or enter 
the holy of holies of deepest love, un- 
til beyond the flat pastures of smug 
comfort and placid agreements of ami- 
ability, there have been some crags to 
clamber, som e beetling heights to grow 
dizzy over, some things to suffer and 
ache for in love's hard service ; — some 
things just wrong, we would think 
them; but they were there in love's 
pathway. And if we failed before them 
we simply lost our pallid friendship and 
our pretty love, and there all ended. 
But if we found that our feet were 



[67] 



The Haunts of the Hind 



made like hinds' feet, fit for just that 
sort of climbing and scrambling and 
toiling and scaling in love's dizzy high 
places, why then the triumph of love's 
deepest potency, and then the satisfac- 
tion of the heart's finest gifts : then the 
ultimate attainment of something that 
trembles not nor fears, but knows the 
worth of human sympathy, in the pas- 
sion of human love. 

And so in other ways of life, in the 
peculiar trials which business men en- 
counter, and social relations bring; in 
the catastrophe of the soul's ambitions 
shattered, and sweet dreams dashed to 
earth ; and in those woefully hard places 
when there suddenly comes as it were 
the utter cave-in of the solid mass of 
what had made life good for love, when 
some dear one — very dear one, whom 
we had loved so much and needed so 

[68] 



The Haunts of the Hind 



much, and felt so much to be the in- 
evitable part of our being's complete- 
ness, — is snatched away in death, and 
the aching chasm of our loss yawns des- 
olately before us ; in all of these hard 
places, in all of these steep, dizzy moun- 
tain-climbs of personal trial, the law of 
life reads inevitably the same : the eter- 
nal scheme of things is framed by the 
Eternal tocontain suchthings (we know 
not why) ; but then the human soul is 
fashioned by the same Eternal One to 
fit this eternal scheme, and triumph in 
it. 

Some souls never seem to find it out ; 
and they are the discouraged souls who 
make a failure of life. Some men, in- 
deed, seem to make their life successes 
with great ease, and we envy them. And 
I do not insist that there is not much 
which does not seem quite even-handed 

[69] 



The Haunts of the Hind 



in the way in which what we usually 
call success is distributed, in this pecu- 
liar world of ours. But then that is not 
our life-concern, for your problem and 
mine in life is just to find our way of 
making the letters of our lives spell "suc- 
cess/' however they get jumbled up, 
and to trust that there is a divine Fact 
of God in the universe as interested in 
this endeavor of ours as we, who is ever 
working with us. But however that 
may be, the more I study success as any 
man may measure it, the more surely 
do I find that the men who have suc- 
ceeded in any substantial fashion are 
men who have not had pasture-lands all 
along their way, but have had their 
dizzy heights to scale and their rocky, 
narrowpasses to scramble through. And 
they have done it, and found some j oy in 
doing it ! And they have done it because 

[70] 



IX 



The Haunts of the Hind 



they have had confidence that they 
could do it; that they were good for it : 
they were made that way, — they had 
"feet like hinds 5 feet/' they could walk 
along their own high places. 

Now, was there a sense in which these 
men were " good for it ' ' in which some 
other men have not been "good" for 
their hard places ? Yes, — no; the thing 
has two aspects. For the secret of the 
success of these successful men, it seems 
to me, is simply self-realization and 
the confidence and the faith and the joy 
that comes with it. Here is the supreme 
religious fact of life. God is with us, 
every one. The Eternal works for every 
soul that is born into the world; the 
universe is good for every individual 
in his individuality, and not simply for 
all men in the mass: it is a universe 
to meet the possibilities of every human 
_ 



The Haunts of the Hind 



soul; and the secret of essential reli- 
gion is just the discovery of the soul 
that it is made good for whatever it is 
called to meet and endure in life, step 
by step, day by day. And when the hard 
places come, and the high places must 
be scaled, and the bleak, rough crags 
must be leaped, and the steep and nar- 
row passes clambered through, He who 
made the crags is there to make our 
crag-climbing feet like hinds' feet, that 
we need not stumble, but, like the hind, 
walk upon our high places and feel at 
home, — for God has made it so. 



[72] 



DO WE SEE NATURE? 



[73] 




DO WE SEE NATURE? 

HERE comes a time of year 
when it is the good custom 
of people everywhere to 
take their little trips or plan 
their longer sojourns away from home 
to visit where they think the face of 
Nature is most beautiful and pleasing. 
They go among the mountains, or to 
the banks of some beautiful lake, or 
amid the wooded islands of some pic- 
turesque stream, or wait in the ennob- 
ling presence of the infinite sea. For 
nearly everybody is in love with Nature 
in these latter times; the passion of 
Nature-admiration is well-nigh uni- 
versal. 

And yet, hard as it is to realize it, the 
love of Nature is a comparatively mod- 
ern sentiment. The ancients and me- 



[75] 



Do we see Nature? 



diaevals knew scarcely anything of it. 
In the days when the most exquisite 
statues were chiselled, and when almost 
the loftiest poems were written, yes, 
even in the days when the most artistic 
pictures were painted and the grandest 
masterpieces of architecture raised 
their sublime heights of entrenched 
beauty throughout Europe, the real- 
ization that Nature had a beauty too 
of her own was almost wholly unat- 
tained. The most gifted geniuses and 
greatest minds caught no message there 
of beauty; the sublime, the grand, the 
graceful, spoke no word to them out 
of mountains, or rushing streams, or 
lashing ocean, or extending plains: 
— though it spoke so plainly from the 
handiwork of man. 

No, Nature was then as now brim full 
of her grand messages of beauty ; she 



A [I«] 



Do we see Nature? 



was running over with her gospels and 
prophecies of sublimity and grace and 
earnest loveliness; but only when men 
learned to listen in her direction, and 
had the attention of their souls turned 
that way; — only when they lifted up 
their eyes to look her reverently in the 
face and say, " Speak, O Nature, for thy 
servants hear," could she speak to tell 
them that she was beautiful, worthy of 
their love and reverence. And so only 
in modern times the bold headlands 
and barren sand-plains along the coast, 
which were once but dangerous points 
for sailors to avoid, have become fa- 
mous resorts to which our people flock 
in thousands ; and mountains that were 
only barriers to trade and commerce 
make themselves shrines to which great 
multitudes pay their annual pilgrim- 
ages. Our ancestors had these things, 

[77] 



Do we see Nature? 



but knew them not; and all the in- 
tenser is our love and admiration for 
them because so late developed. 

And now we gain but a fragment of 
the message. We are only half listen- 
ing. We vaunt ourselves on our more 
refined appreciativeness of the beauty 
of Nature, and yet we only repeat the 
childishness of Samuel in the old story: 
we hear the voice and then run back 
to our Elis, — our lower, narrower con- 
ceptions of the world and its enjoy- 
ments, and seek the whole of the inter- 
pretation there. In a measure we have 
learned to listen so as to hear the mes- 
sage of Beauty which Nature has to 
speak ; but don't we most of us miss a 
higher voice which is there too, — how 
it speaks a message not simply of more 
developed grandeur and sublimity of 
beauty, but how, too, it may have a 

[78] 



Do we see Nature? 



gospel of exalting truth which may be 
converted into terms of loftier charac- 
ter and life ? Have many of us trained 
our ears to hear the holier voices of what 
is beautiful about us ; to catch glimpses 
of the face of God shining through it, 
— the things that accord with true and 
manly life, and discord with mean and 
dishonorable life? Have many of us 
learned to live better lives because we 
see nobler nature? Have many of us 
learned to feel purer instincts of hero- 
ism because God towers before us in 
the grandeur of the mountain, or has 
waited before us in the abiding patience 
of the wide-spread sea ? I think it is 
there: this sure, firm, unmistakable 
voice of divineness in Nature, this thing 
that suggests loftiness and elevation of 
soul, that manifests God. It is there, 
though so few of us see it ; just as the 

[79] 



Do we see Nature? 



beauty is there which we all recognize 
to-day, though the ancients were so un- 
conscious of it. It is there calling to 
us, the voice of heaven, not earth ; the 
voice of God, not of Eli; but we miss 
it because we are not listening. 

I remember a friend of mine who 
made a good deal of fuss when the Ger- 
man Opera first came to Boston, of 
going to hear one of Wagner's grand 
masterpieces. She adjusted all her so- 
cial engagements for a month ahead 
that they should not interfere with this 
event; she had a messenger boy out 
overnight at the sale of the tickets in 
order to secure a good seat, and paid a 
high price for it when it was obtained ; 
she got herself with a good deal of 
trouble to the opera-house half an hour 
before the curtain rose, so anxious was 
she not to miss a note; she equipped 
_ 



* 



Do we see Nature? 



herself with great array of libretti ', opera 
glasses, and orchestra score: — and 
came away, after the performance was 
over, highly pleased with the gorgeous 
scenery of the second act, quite in rap- 
tures over the smoothness and finish of 
Alvari's phenomenal tenor, and not a 
little enthusiastic over the beauty of 
one of the minor singers ! She seemed 
to have not the faintest consciousness 
in the world of the almost religious 
impressiveness of the motif of the great 
artist's masterpiece; its wonderful in- 
terpretation of strong, earnest, human 
passion. The grand art of musical 
poetry, profound in its reaches of emo- 
tion and aspiration, was entirely lost 
on her. They were there, but she was 
not listening for them ; she had no ear 
for their message. She was admiring 
painted canvas and vocal execution and 

[ii] 



Do we see Nature ? 



pretty faces ; a greater voice spoke in her 
presence and she knew nothing of it. 

I fear that some of us who make such 
a fuss over our love of Nature — who 
worship at her shrine so piously, who 
give of our money and of our time, 
often at so much of personal sacrifice, 
every year, that we may see some rare 
new phase of ocean or mountain, or 
forest or river loveliness — are a good 
deal like this foolish young woman at 
the opera: we don't really get our 
money's worth, we don't get paid for 
all our fuss, because we do not listen, 
we do not look for the best and grand- 
est and truest of what we have paid to 
see and hear. Its higher voice is there, 
a divine message, a holy inspiration of 
life. It is there ; we might hear it; we 
do hear at any rate the calling of its 
voice, but we turn so soon away. 



M A 



Do we see Nature? 



And so in other things in life ; in the 
profound things and sublime things 
which come in contact with our ex- 
periences elsewhere: the high voices 
of literature, the revelations of science, 
the divine memories of childhood, the 
holy of holies of the home, in all these 
relations of life the voices are there 
which are the voices of God ; but they 
are there to us only if we have learned 
the secret of listening for them as for 
the voice of God. 

I do not mean to make any intangible 
mysticism of this ; I am not referring 
to any occult presence of God in Na- 
ture or life. I only want to call every 
voice that summons us to worthier liv- 
ing, everything in life that has uplift- 
ing power, that suggests nobler and 
truer ways of being manly and wom- 
anly, everything in life that may open 

[83] 



Do we see Nature? 



a way out of a narrower and meaner 
mode of character into a larger and 
more exalted one, — a voice of God. I 
think that is the truth of it ; and life 
about us fairly rings with such voices. 
They speak from every corner, they 
mingle with the experiences of every 
day. They are voices of God summon- 
ing us to new destinies, and it is our 
fault if we mistake them for voices of 
earth, only calling us to old duties and 
visions of life. Perhaps after all those 
old prophets of Israel who could say 
so confidently " Thus saith the Lord " ; 
who could stand on the mountain-tops 
of prophecy and so grandly speak the 
oracles of divine truth as though they 
looked into heaven and saw with the 
eyes of angels: perhaps after all they 
only differed from other men in know- 
ing better how to recognize the voice 



[s^] v; 



Do we see Nature ? 



of God when He spoke, and made not 
the mistake of calling high things low 
things, or confusing Elis with the Al- 
mighty Presence. 

However that maybe we may be sure 
of this, that there are enough " thus 
saith the Lords " lavished about us ev- 
ery day, were we only ready to discern 
them ; there are enough visions of heav- 
en, enough prophecies of divine life, 
right in sight of all of us, to make us 
all Samuels and Elijahs if only we could 
learn the secret of listening and look- 
ing for them and catching their eter- 
nal message. 

" Not only around our infancy/' sings 
our American poet in answer to the 
immortal words of the great English 
singer, Wordsworth, — 

cc Not only around our infancy 

Doth heaven with all its splendors lie : 



m _^ 



Do we see Nature? 



Daily with souls that cringe and plot 
We Sinais climb and know it not. 
Over our manhood bend the skies; 
Against our fallen and traitor lives, 
The great winds utter prophecies ; 
With our faint hearts the mountain strives; 
Its arms outstretched, the druid wood 
Waits with its benedicite, 
And to our age's drowsy blood 
Still shouts the inspiring sea." 



[86] 



SEP 12 1907 



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